Mark L. Stout Consulting is an all-purpose transportation consulting firm, specializing in finance, program management, and legislative and DOT policy. Our company has served public agencies and non-profits, big and small, all across the nation. Mark is widely-recognized as an expert whose years of experience can help organizations to break through gridlock and deliver transformative projects and innovative community enhancements.

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Tuesday, August 20, 2013

The Roads Must Roll! (….out of the 3-D printer)

While Elon Musk’s Hyperloop has gotten all the buzz lately,
a much more obscure announcement may turn out to be a bigger deal.

MIT scientists have announced (link here) that they have
engineered a way to have 3-D printers make small pieces of composite materials
that lock together to form very large structures.(OK, I know this doesn’t sound exciting yet…be patient.)

So, as the press release notes, composite fiber materials
are light and strong and are ideal for building things like airplanes.But with current technology, the large
pieces (like airplane fuselage elements) need to be formed all at once to have
full structural integrity.Using
little interlocking bits, like kids’ building set pieces, you can make really
large pieces out of thousands of little ones.The MIT folks have figured out how to “lock” the little
pieces in a way that they have great structural stability in the desired
directions, but can be flexible in other desired directions and even
disassembled for repair.They are
now working on robotic production techniques to produce and link up the little
building blocks.

The MIT scientists suggest that aircraft construction is an
obvious application, but the idea could also work for bridges.

Bridges!And if
bridges, why not roads?

Imagine a “paving” machine consisting of a large-scale 3-D
printer ejecting and linking millions of composite “paving stones” along a
roadbed.

It’s now been 101 years since Edison put down his Concrete
Mile in Warren County, New Jersey, demonstrating the practicability of concrete
paving.Maybe it’s time for a “3-D
Printed Mile!”